


The Body You Wear

by Tammany



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gender Changes, Gender optional, Gender unstable, M/M, gender fluid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-27 02:40:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19781578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: This is triggered by the last story, and is a continuing exploration of what it might mean to have your gender be at your discretion. In this case, as both Crowley and Aziraphale appear to be inclined to varying degrees to a "home base" assumption of male (slightly greater for Aziraphale, as Crowley is apparently female as both Nanny Ashteroth and at the Crucifixion...), I am writing Crowley as a character exploring the female mode as the exception, rather than the rule. "He" is usually male, and I'm writing that as Crowley's base identity.I can see arguments for writing him/her/they otherwise. I am just not doing so in this story.





	The Body You Wear

The body you wear changes things. It changes how people react to you. It changes how you react to yourself. If you doubt it, ask anyone who’s just lost eighty pounds. Ask any athlete who’s worked years to reach performance peak, only to rip a tendon. Ask any transsexual struggling to decide what permanent changes they need to make, and what changes to ignore.

Ask any angel. Or demon.

Crowley, for example.

In serpent form, though he keeps his demonic wits about him, his dominant self becomes slow, steady, focused. He wants few things: heat, water, food. He experiences little more, other than the longing ache for company he’s suffered since the Fall. He basks in the sun and dreams of caves filled with writhing others, and waking knows he has remembered the time before the Fall, when the choirs of Heaven were one, and they sang in harmony together.

Back when God loved him. Back when he was whole.

Serpents don’t cry. Not even demonic ones.

They do ask too many questions.

He had asked too many question, back in the day when his wings were white and his confidence seemed eternal. One of the things he asked that he shouldn’t have was, “What’s She going to do about it, after all?” Then he’d answered himself, thinking, “Nothing. Not so long as I don’t actually hurt anyone. She loves us. She’ll forgive us when we stray.” And he’d strayed. Not a lot. A little detour here. A detour there. Before mankind was ever formed, he’d slip away with Lucy and the gang, bitch about the boredom, hunger for free rein in co-creations. Instead it was always “That’s far enough. Just right. No farther, saith the Lord thy God” when he could imagine going so much farther. Drama, explosions, nova after nova!

“There is an order to all things,” She said. You could wait eternity for Her to allow you one extra flourish, one dark gothic jest.

Now he yearns for Aziraphale and warm arms, for the comfort the angel offered just by sharing space. Beyond that, forever unspoken , Crowley longs for the unity of the choir and the bulwark of God’s love.

Gone. Gone, gone, gone.

In his usual corporeal attire as the male demon Crowley, he is more confident. Crowley’s swagger may be assumed, but within the frame of the performance it works for him. He owns the pavement, commands the traffic crossing, dominates his ventures with man and demon. He walks on the “outside” whenever they are together, protecting his angel from oncoming traffic, intrusive demons, sarky human gang members. He’s large and in charge—and if that’s a cliché, he doesn’t care. What he cares about is the strut and the stride, the drawled quip, the speedy retort. He cares about the sly laughter hidden in everything. All that—and his angel.

His. His own. His angel.

The angel melts his heart. He’s melted his heart since Eden. Who else would talk on the ramparts with Satan’s serpent? Who else would share his jokes—exchange worries? Shelter a fallen Angel smelling of fire and brimstone, of damp soil and snake, from God’s holy rain?

He has a weakness for Aziraphale that reduces him to smiling, besotted fondness.

He knows it to be love—a love divine. He remembers it from the old days, when the broad, generic feel of love was everywhere. Now? Now it all seems to channel through the angel: when Crowley loves a sunset, he loves it with the angel, or, when apart, he loves it for the angel. When he weeps for the children God smites in her unending search for the perfect narrative, it is with his angel alone he can release the horror and the tears.

Not that he does.

In his male form he is above that. In his male form he may show shock—but in the end he hides it behind snark and smirk and cool.

When Crowley is in his male form, Aziraphale becomes bashful and coy. Always protective, but also always on the defense, wary of his demon. Wary of Crowley, who is too fast, too wicked, too willing to cut the angel off from his loyalty to Good.

To God.

To Good. That’s what it’s supposed to be about, isn’t it? Not about mere sides, but about primal values? Good and evil. How can the angel betray Heaven, if Heaven represents all that is good? If Heaven is slow, rainy mornings and pleasant little bistros, if it’s children running in the yard who will make it to adulthood? If it’s hours feeding ducks with Crowley, chatting in amiable companionship?

How can Aziraphale oppose God if God is the hope that his demon will someday be taken back, forgiven by God—as he is by Aziraphale?

By his very nature, Crowley rallies Aziraphale’s defenses. Who shall forgive the demon, if the angel falls from grace for the demon?

Yet even in his male body, Crowley never forgets a white wing arched over him.

In his female body, he can think of almost nothing else.

His female body is no soft touch. She’s cool and crisp, clever and resolute. She is a bastion of control.

Yet in his female form she has held the boy, Warlock, and wiped his eyes when he has fallen, (while assuring him in brisk Scottish tones that a Prince of Hell must not cry…). She has applied bandages. She has offered ice cream cones while out in the park. She has pushed the swing and safely caught the child hurtling down the slide. She has wiped the child’s fringe back from his forehead as he has puked up his lunch, sick with the flu. She has sung him lullabies—sweet if horrible. Tender if brooding. She has taught the boy his letters and found a sweet spot in which she may suggest the boy think outside the box of God Approved goodness, while leaving enough room for Aziraphale to still work his “thwarting.” That means months when she and her charge sit by the nursery fire reading Harry Potter aloud. That has meant sharing the Little Prince. If it has also included the wry, doubting Pullman, so much the better. There they have found the shared dry uncertainty of a universe played by mad rules.

In his female form she has mothered forth affection for the strange, normal boy who seems far too normal.

In his female form she’s discussed the boy with Aziraphale, both “in costume,” hissing conclusions in the groves of the garden and halls of the mansion, working to subvert both Heaven and Hell.

She has loved the angel then for his power and his majesty—for that constant determination to do right, and to protect.

Since the End that never ended Crowley has made love to Aziraphale. More than once, though not yet many times…

Once, just once, she has done it in her female body.

She’s still taller than the angel, but she’s slimmer than Crowley ever was in his male form. The angel’s palm seems to occupy the small of her back from side to side. She has allowed the angel to draw her down onto his lap. She felt slight. Delicate. Easily broken open. Easily shattered. So very easily shattered.

Her breast was like an egg in the nest of her angel’s hand. Her breath shivered at the touch and pinch of her angel’s fingers. Kissed, she gasped for breath. Stroked, she sighed. Lifted up, she felt his power, his control…

When white wings tented them, holding their love safe from the world, she laid her head on his breast and drank in the sound of his mortal-immortal heart, his body no more stable than hers. She rejoiced in the memory that, even discorporated, her angel had endured—not lost forever. Even the forces of Heaven and Hell would have to work to take her anchor, her fortress, her cherished garden from her.

It was only once, but that once was of infinite power.

Once, he kissed her lips open.

Once, his hand stroked her crotch, found her tenderest flesh, touched her clit and roused it, plumbed her pussy with a thick and forceful thumb and made her moan.

Once he had asked her how she wanted to be taken. Once, she told him “Everyway. Anyway. Forever, Angel…I want you to take all of me...”

Once she shuddered as he rolled them, knelt over her, slipped into her, still stroking, hand matching the heavy, thick drive of his cock. Still kissing.

Aziraphale, her angel, was no different in spirit than he had been when Crowley had taken him—

Crowley as man. Aziraphale as both man and as woman. They’d explored so much, and would explore more in the years to come…

(God permitting—and Crowley once again found herself praying to God, “Test them—but not to destruction…Please, God, not to destruction…”)

Please, God, not to destruction.

And that once, lying in her angel’s arms, woman to Aziraphale’s man, she had climaxed, over and over, swept on a stream of longing thousands of years in the making. On a river of love and loss and need he had not let himself fully experience in his male form, as the cocky demon Crowley.

Once, spent and helpless, she laid her face on her lover’s chest and cried, fingers tangling in his mad-boy cropped hair.

It was different.

The body you wear changes things: How the world sees you. How you see the world. How you see yourself.

Crowley had now seen herself in Aziraphale’s arms—slighter, more fragile. Protected. Adored and adoring. It is no more precious than all the other ways they have explored. He has loved Aziraphale, man or woman, lover in his arms, and has loved Aziraphale taking him in male form, too. Each offers certain splendors.

But, having been Aziraphale’s woman—his demon and his woman—she knew she would choose to be that again.

Lying in the aftermath she had smiled as her lover slept beside her, head pillowed on her ribs, arms around her tiny waist. She had stroked his wild hair like a woman strokes a beloved cat and wondered, idly, what it would be like to love Aziraphale, woman to woman, both tender, both seeing themselves in female form and mode.

That, she thought with a smile, would be an idea for another day.

In the meantime, there was this: His hand on her small breast. The memory of his mouth on her body, above and below. The shelter of his wings.

The body you wear changes things. Not always for the better, or for the worse.

It just changes things.


End file.
